Emergys Corp. comments on the use of the hub and spoke method
Chapel Hill, NC — July 29, 2004 — Emergys Corp., a North Carolina-based business transformation service provider, announced strategies for large manufacturing companies to maximize benefits from the investments on enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions.
According to Emergys, large manufacturers are under market pressure to reduce costs and accelerate time to market. With business-critical data spread across multiple divisions and disparate systems, corporations are often faced with the challenges of making the right information technology (IT) decisions for these off-headquarter locations.
The company said pushing the tier-one application from its headquarter into its divisions and plants may be overwhelming for the divisions in terms of the complexity of the application and the costs; and yet increasing globalization mandates information integration now more than ever before.
For such dilemmas, Emergys suggested a "hub and spoke" strategy. For instance, an ERP solution is deployed/maintained at the headquarter location or the corporate "hub," allowing the manufacturer to manage its global operations. Next, a flexible, low-cost application is implemented at the division or "spoke" level. Then all the integrated solutions at the divisions' level are connected to the corporate "hub" and the entire organization moves forward in sync.
Emergys' Jai Shankar, the company's president and CEO, commented that the hub and spoke strategy allows corporate leaders to implement a cost-effective solution to track plant performance and meet with regulatory reporting requirements. "In addition, the division leaders can manage plant operations and provide consolidated financial reporting to the hub without the overheads of a tier-one enterprise class solution," he said.
Customization is easily accomplished at division and/or user level with the software options that are available on the market today, Emergys said. Tools such as forecasting, planning and financial reporting let the divisions automate inefficient manual processes.
